22 Responses to this entry

Maybe aliens don’t come to Earth because they look at the whole planet as a garbage disposal program. All advanced alien civilizations must have settled on the truth of isolationism. How else to explain their non-interference with us? A mind-bending thought experiment is imagining what it would be like if it were possible to live in one of these advanced alien civilizations until Alien Trump built a galactic wall to keep out all earthlings, even wypipo. How would that make you feel, monkeyboys?

What you describe is called the “Zoo Hypothesis” and, despite the fact that it is an explicitly non-falsifiable theory, dozens of scientific papers treat it seriously. This one, for instance, is pretty interesting.

What people never take into account is that aliens couldn’t actually land on Earth. A simple bacteria they brought with them might feed on the nitrogen in the atmosphere and cause ecological collapse. If not nitrogen then any one of a number of chemical pathways could be disrupted. The Aliens would have to catalogue every bacteria on Earth and what it does, then every bacteria on their own planet, and then every possible destructive combination that could occur. The number of possible permutations that would require simulation would delay contact for trillions of years, and only one bad simulation would be enough to deter them.

Equalism is extremely pernicious; it is the unacknowledged, faceless source of many of the ills of the modern world. The inevitable consequence of equalism is despair. If everything is leveled, if we are all held to be equally worthless, the gifts of the superior man go unacknowledged, are forsaken, are even possibly reviled as objects of hatred. Then the superior man inevitably realizes that there is a “want of proportion between the effort and the reward” in his life. Why must he waste his gifts and toil to support sneering inferiors?

We can take solace in two things:
First, in heroic philosophies. Should one merge Zapffe’s dark “biosophy” with Nietzsche’s warrior vitality and Schopenhauer’s cold common sense, that would fit the bill nicely. That such a philosophy would be essentially social-Darwinist, true in the eyes of Gnon, and supremacist on both individual and societal scales, would quickly become apparent to all who pursue it. Truth is cold comfort, but it is a comfort nevertheless.

Second, in the fact that we may well live to see mankind diverge into several different species. Given advances in biology and genetic engineering, and given a time line of several centuries at most, this is utterly inevitable. No laws can stop it. This eventuality will put paid to the pretense of equalism, as the existence of biologically distinct overclasses and underclasses shall become more viscerally apparent and meaningful. (Though it must be said that said distinctions are quite apparent already. Certain peoples produce nothing of any value whatsoever.)

we may well live to see mankind diverge into several different species

Things looking like offshoots of humanity might well emerge, but I’d say it’s more enlightening to view them as new species of industrial capital.

This perspective also highlights a core weakness of such “post-human” machine hybrids. They’ll almost certainly be much more non-viable in the absence of very advanced industrial infrastructure than humans. They might not even be capable of mere reproduction without roomfuls of advanced equipment.

Their relatively much higher level of dependency on an already highly interdependent industrial base makes them fragile. They’ll be so superior that baseline Luddites will be able to genocide them with a single decently scaled coordinated attack on key infrastructure.

It is, I think, apparent that the concepts we’re discussing are fairly diffuse. And it is by no means clear that post-human entities shall be any less robust than we are. Consider a set of wholly biological revisions:

First, small genetic tweaks to improve cardiovascular health, and to make for stronger muscles and bones. This is presently-viable technology; if you find the right technicians, are not averse to risk, and have sufficient funds to finance these procedures, there’s no scientific or technical reason they can’t be done today.

Second, additions to the human genome. A small but very attractive one would be for the ability to break down cellulose in plant cell walls, which would allow for the much more efficient digestion of food. Another useful addition would be the ability to regenerate limbs and damaged nerves, like so many animals do. A third useful addition would be for redundant bodily organs. The ability to interface with machines and implants without spurring hazardous immune reactions is likely to become important, so modifications to the immune and histaminergic systems may be worthwhile. Surely you can think of dozens more. This sort of genetic engineering — the sort rooted in biomimicry — is likely to become technologically feasible within the next 20 years.

Third, broad genetic engineering for intelligence enhancement. That this could potentially be recursive, and that it would meaningfully improve every aspect of human fitness, including robustness, should go without saying. It is impossible to say how near at hand this is, but all indications are that it’s not an intractable problem, and it is likely to be solved well within our lifetimes.

These things are impossible to ban, particularly when done in embryos. Baseline proles aren’t going to get any better — and in fact it looks like their lot is gradually getting worse, and shall continue to get worse — but a fraction of humanity is going to transcend its origins, first subtly, and then in more obvious ways. I deliberately avoided the discussion of man-machine hybrids — but those, too, are increasingly feasible and are almost certainly inevitable. The bifcuration of the human species is impending. If we don’t fuck things up, our descendants a few centuries hence are likely to be completely unrecognizable, for better or worse.

‘Beyond the bright light’ it says in the song Youtube autoplays for me, while “I” compose a retort to this.

Alas, I haven’t mastered the Void Dragon’s sufficiently yet, as my mouse pointer is acting so erratically that I decided to finish the text later.

It’s been acting that way for a few dozen hours since I tried installing apparent Drivers for a phone I was connecting. Usually it’s just plug-n-play but I have a hacked version of Windows going on now, called Tiny7, which I heartily recommend—altho it can have troubles like not having nowadays drivers.

The maker of the series is called eXPer1ence. He made a ~700 MB version of Windows Server 2003 (Micro2003) and a ~99 MB version of WinXP.* Welcome to the world of OS modding.

—» Windows Tiny7 Rev01 ‘Unattended’ ‘Activated’ ISO (x86). Total size after install is 1.64 Gb*, and the install is [AIW] completely autonomous [this is the unattended part]. ». So you need only 2 GB hard drive or chip to run your whole PC, but you can play even 2017 state-of-the-art heavy duty 3D games on this OS.

So far as I know this nigga was the best in Windows modding, albeit genius doesn’t always come with present-day Economics computable capital » “PS people asking about a new Tiny7… I used to live a lot more comfortably than I am right now and modding Windows used to be a lot more possible. These days I have not got a pot to piss in. Modding Windows is one thing but not knowing where your next meal is coming from is another. ” »—(Naise relays this in 2011/05/29 but it seems it’s posted by eXPer1ence in ’09.)

Stripping down to essentials is not the only way of modding, obviously, but as some readers might have gleaned already this is what the “Tiny” in the name refers to in this mod. I’ve used this for years. A decade. It’s often much faster vs nonhacked. Good for recycled hardware, and thinware (e.g. nettops). Also the time for install gives a ‘disposable’ feeling to your approach on fresh-installs. Flash storage is already a lot cheaper in 2017 than it was when I started using this. And better. But still there’s something quite cool, for a minimalist, to be able to boot an OS from a extreme-disposable-price chip the size of a small necklace.

—» The original Tiny was just to see how stripped down he could get it… be it for an old pc or not, he wanted to see how stripped down it could get.
He put it up for people to see how it works and get input. but he ran into trolls….. “yeah can you ad call of duty” or some stupid stuff that really shouldn’t be in what he was doing. He even wrote this in the read me file of one of the distros he did and it was in the TPB thread where people explained this to the people who followed and flooded TPB with requests. He even chimed in once and said “yeah I don’t do request anymore” »

I can use your grandmas ol’ USB thumb-drive, or her 90s clunky noisy old rotating platters HDD, as well as the latest Next Generation Form Factor aka M.2 2242 Solid State Drive from Corsair.

Maximum speed (booting and running), minimalism, and compatibility in terms of Windows would be a hacked version of eXPer1ence’s already-hacked Tiny7.**

Or Windows 10. I haven’t even moved on to the hacked W10s.

Most modders of W aren’t as bootstrap Ranger as XP1 tho. They tend to mostly just add installed-with programs and themes to the OS-install. I.e. they just modify your GUI for extreme effects (typically something black n’ sleek) and add programs to the menu (like VLC, OpenOffice), and maybe remove a few things. Nothing too bootstrap-elite.

But since these geeks are sometime into great software, what they include can be an introduction to you of something you’ll like. At least that’s the case with software that changed my GUI usage for good: Voidtool’s «Everything».

—» TRUXTER 2011/06/29
He needs to work for Microsoft, because he knows what we want with an os. With what they show in previews of code name Windows 8, they haven’t a clue. »

Hypothetical genetic modifications that don’t tie their human carriers to the industrial capital base that created them would simply sweep humanity if they’re really that advantageous. No speciation.

The (much larger, if I’d had to guess) fraction of other new genes and additions are either ineffective mixtures of snake oil and fashion, or where effective, slave their carriers to the ecological context that created them, a fragile global industrial production network open to attack by both smart Luddites and dumb luck.

Like you, I believe a lot of this will happen. Unlike you, I don’t think of the speciated ones as our descendants, and I think they’ll be relatively easy to eradicate, once we get fed up with them.

Hegemonizing Swarm Reply:May 3rd, 2017 at 9:35 pm

> Their relatively much higher level of dependency on an already highly interdependent industrial base makes them fragile. They’ll be so superior that baseline Luddites will be able to genocide them with a single decently scaled coordinated attack on key infrastructure.

That’s pretty much the plight of current technological civilization. A few well-targeted strikes, I’m afraid, will bring us back to 1900’s-level tech. A few semiconductor foundries, a few factories that provide the tools for them.
Everything is so tightly coupled and centralized that the rest will unravel from there.
To survive we’d need to decentralize production, and parallelize it more – like how biology works. Preferably before we get to machine hybrids. Though I don’t think it will make much of a difference from now – the survival of most of us is already completely predicated on maintaining the current level of technology. Arguably integrating technology into ourselves (like cyborgs) would make the dependency worse but I’m not convinced the risk can be any higher than it is now already… We’re *not* robust.

That’s pretty much the plight of current technological civilization. A few well-targeted strikes, I’m afraid, will bring us back to 1900’s-level tech.

Nah, this is just an entry-level myth.

There’s too much stuff in books, manuals, and in the things themselves, that are much newer than most of the 1900s.
In landfills, in basements, in caves, in tunnels, in dams, in sunken vessels, in mountains, in remote locations, in blast-shelters.
That’s surviving Information. Retranslatable. Reverse engineerable. Reconstructable.

John Hannon Reply:May 3rd, 2017 at 5:19 pm

“Schopenhauer’s cold common sense”

Schopenhauer did, however, warm to the not so common “experience that dissolves the distinction between the I and the Not-I” as “the foundation of morality” –

“For if plurality and distinction belong only to this world of appearances, and if one and the same Being is what is beheld in all these living things, well then, the experience that dissolves the distinction between the I and the Not-I cannot be false. On the contrary: its opposite must be false. The former experience underlies the mystery of compassion, and stands, in fact, for the reality of which compassion is the prime expression. That experience, therefore, must be the metaphysical ground of ethics and consist simply in this: that one individual should recognize in another, himself in his own true being.”